Xeni spoke with Ashwin Vasavada, Deputy Project Scientist at JPL for the MSL mission, to understand more about how MSL works and what its creators hope to accomplish, how one scores a job designing interplanetary explorer robots, and how this updated Mars rover is (or is not) like an iPad.

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing: So, the MSL and Curiosity unveiling this week represents a big milestone for you folks.

Ashwin Vasavada, NASA JPL: Right. The rover is almost complete. We've been working on for several years now, it has all come together and works great and we're putting the final touches on.

BB: So as I understand it, Curiosity will have a lot more science gathering capability than either Spirit or Opportunity.

Ashwin Vasavada: Yes. You can think of it as having nearly everything that Spirit and Opportunity had in the sense that it's a rover capable of driving over some pretty rough terrain, have cameras to look around at the landscape, had some instruments on the end of a robotic arm to look at rocks up-close and do some chemical analysis up-close on the rock. But in addition to that, it has a major new capability of being able to take samples of rocks and soils, and analyze those samples in instruments on board the rover itself.

BB: So much of the science and the public interest around Mars expeditions has been -- is there water on Mars, with the thought being that this would mean life on Mars. How does this change that question?

Ashwin Vasavada: Well, that definitely is the kind of overarching question in Mars exploration, is there life on Mars today? Was there ever life on Mars in the past? As we've tried to answer that question over the past two decades, we realized it's a pretty difficult question to answer. Not only do you need very sophisticated instruments to be able to detect microbial life, but that may not be the kind of life that we're used to on Earth.

But you also have to know a lot about Mars itself as a planet and where you might want to look for life, where the sort of environmental niches are on Mars. What the Mars Science Laboratory aims to do is not detect life directly, but ask those questions about the environment on Mars, and specifically early Mars, a period for which there's a lot of evidence that there were rivers and lakes and a much more kind of a life-friendly environment. So we're going to go to a place that dates back from Mars' early history, maybe three billion, four billion years ago and try to detect whether that environment at that time was an environment that could have supported life.

Xeni spoke with Ashwin Vasavada, Deputy Project Scientist at JPL for the MSL mission, to understand more about how MSL works and what its creators hope to accomplish, how one scores a job designing interplanetary explorer robots, and how this updated Mars rover is (or is not) like an iPad.

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing: So, the MSL and Curiosity unveiling this week represents a big milestone for you folks.

Ashwin Vasavada, NASA JPL: Right. The rover is almost complete. We've been working on for several years now, it has all come together and works great and we're putting the final touches on.

BB: So as I understand it, Curiosity will have a lot more science gathering capability than either Spirit or Opportunity.

Ashwin Vasavada: Yes. You can think of it as having nearly everything that Spirit and Opportunity had in the sense that it's a rover capable of driving over some pretty rough terrain, have cameras to look around at the landscape, had some instruments on the end of a robotic arm to look at rocks up-close and do some chemical analysis up-close on the rock. But in addition to that, it has a major new capability of being able to take samples of rocks and soils, and analyze those samples in instruments on board the rover itself.

BB: So much of the science and the public interest around Mars expeditions has been -- is there water on Mars, with the thought being that this would mean life on Mars. How does this change that question?

Ashwin Vasavada: Well, that definitely is the kind of overarching question in Mars exploration, is there life on Mars today? Was there ever life on Mars in the past? As we've tried to answer that question over the past two decades, we realized it's a pretty difficult question to answer. Not only do you need very sophisticated instruments to be able to detect microbial life, but that may not be the kind of life that we're used to on Earth.

But you also have to know a lot about Mars itself as a planet and where you might want to look for life, where the sort of environmental niches are on Mars. What the Mars Science Laboratory aims to do is not detect life directly, but ask those questions about the environment on Mars, and specifically early Mars, a period for which there's a lot of evidence that there were rivers and lakes and a much more kind of a life-friendly environment. So we're going to go to a place that dates back from Mars' early history, maybe three billion, four billion years ago and try to detect whether that environment at that time was an environment that could have supported life.